This simple test will prove whether or not you are a secret genius

Since Donald Trump tweeted about being a "stable genius" this weekend, many people have begun to question exactly what qualifies someone to claim the title. Well, conventionally, to be labeled a genius, a person must register as having an IQ of 140 or above after taking a standardized test.

However, there are problems when it comes to assessing intelligence levels based on traditional intelligence quotient exams. First of all, they exclude people who are illiterate or have some form of reading difficulty such as dyslexia. Secondly, the results of IQ tests tend to vary according to a person's age, with some research showing that - on paper - children are more intelligent than adults.

The biggest problem, however, is that IQ tests do not account for social or creative intelligence, so they're not really a valid reflection of how intellectually capable a person would be in the real world.

Now, however, there is an alternative to the sorts of pen-and-paper tests that have been about for over a century.

Rather than testing intelligence based on a series of verbal and non-verbal reasoning questions, this new version of the test examines the efficiency of a person's brain based on how well they can perceive motion. It won't give an accurate numerical score, unfortunately, but it will provide an idea of how quickly a person's brain functions. This, in turn, can be correlated fairly reliably with how intelligent that person is.

The test was devised at the University of Rochester in the UK, in which a study showed that a more efficient brain is more likely to be a more intelligent brain.

You'll be able to see for yourself in the video below how it works. Basically, all you have to do is try to work out which direction the lines are moving in. Sounds simple, right? Why not give it a go:

So, how was it?

According to the researchers behind the test, if you found it easier to tell which lines were moving in the smaller images, but struggled with the large images, you are more likely to have a higher IQ. This is because smarter people are usually better at filtering out distraction.

As Dr Duje Tadin, one of the co-authors of the study explains, "since this task is so simple and so closely linked to IQ, it may give us clues about what makes a brain more efficient, and, consequently, more intelligent."

The doctor went on:

"We know from prior research which parts of the brain are involved in visual suppression of background motion.

"This new link to intelligence provides a good target for looking at what is different about the neural processing, what’s different about the neurochemistry, what’s different about the neurotransmitters of people with different IQs."

Credit: Getty

Albert Einstein, Rene Descartes, and Charles Dickens were all known geniuses, but they never took an IQ test. Their intelligence was assessed posthumously, and was based on how inventive, creative and expressive they were.

It just goes to show, then, that intelligence can be expressed in many different ways - so don't take the results of any intelligence test too seriously.